Downtown LA

HARD to READ

HARD to READ

“Discipline & Anarchy: A Reading” with Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Chloe Maratta, Chris Kraus, Matias Viegener, and McKenzie Wark.

“… the KATHY ACKER that YOU WANT (as you put it), is another MICKEY MOUSE, you probably know her better than I do. It’s media, Ken. It’s not me.” ―Kathy Acker to McKenzie Wark, I'm Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996

“But: We're still human. Human because we keep on battling against all these horrors, the horrors caused and not caused by us. We battle not in order to stay alive, that would be too materialistic, for we are body and spirit, but in order to love each other.” ―Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

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McKenzie Wark is in town, so we plot around him. I love his e-mail correspondence book with Kathy Acker—its lines like, “I love typos.” So there will be sharing from that (I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995-1996, Semiotexte). Matias Viegener will join us, and Chris Kraus, Ana Cecilia Alvarez, and Chloe Maratta, all reading: surprises. To keep it simple, we’re calling the night “Discipline & Anarchy,” after a flash tattoo doodle Acker included in her 1988 novel Empire of the Senseless (it's a cyborg/pirate terrorist love story, a revelation of the unconscious, that Acker called, “an elegy for the world of our fathers”).

A party follow the reading, DJ’ed by Henry Lee Hopper. Proceeds of book and record sales will go to the Downtown Women’s Center. 

This is part of The Standard, Downtown LA's monthly reading series, HARD to READ, hosted by Fiona Alison Duncan.